


rivers and roads

by fideliant



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-23
Updated: 2012-09-23
Packaged: 2017-11-14 21:04:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/519491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fideliant/pseuds/fideliant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a quest to tear apart the world to get back to John, Sherlock is finally done after three years in the hunt. Only, he hadn't considered the possibility of an afterwards in which that wouldn't nearly be enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rivers and roads

> _nothing is as it has been_   
>  _and I miss your face like hell_
> 
> _rivers and roads_   
>  _rivers and roads_   
>  _rivers ‘til I reach you_

\- _Rivers and Roads_ , The Head and The Heart

 

 

 

He tugs the dark coat on and buttons it up completely save the top one, and turns his collar up past his cheeks. It is the one he used to wear to protect himself from the elements whenever he went out, a coat unworn when it had become too easy for contract killers to recognise a Sherlock Holmes coat when they saw one. It feels different, somehow — the coat seems to swallow him up, flopping over his shoulders and hanging loosely about his sides. He thinks that perhaps he’s lost quite a bit of weight, and wonders exactly what John will say when he lays eyes on him once again.

The hotel room is clean and neat and the bed is even done up properly at the ends, with the blanket crease-free and its edges tucked snugly beneath the top mattress. Anyone could walk into the room without even the slightest clue that someone had stayed in it for three days, going out in the night to track and shoot dead the last known assassin in Moriarty’s organisation of underground associates, a tangled skein running deep beneath continents, cities, ghost towns peppered over the Australian outback. The Bulgarian had been armed with a switchblade knife had put up the most impressive fight out of all of those Sherlock had already picked off — when Sherlock had floored him at close quarters and disarmed him, he brushed himself off and gave the panting man a silent congratulation before taking aim and expending his last chambered round into his forehead. The Browning had slipped from his sweaty fingers after that, clattering to the warehouse floor. Sherlock stood with his head tilted back and his eyes brimming over from gunsmoke and a tinny ringing in his ears, and let himself fully believe that it was finally all over.

He breathed easy for the first time in three years, a hand palmed over the base of his throat.

Later back in the hotel room he sterilised the bathroom with hypochlorite and washed and washed for hours, scouring his hands in the bleached-white porcelain basin, and scrubbed at himself roughly in the shower with the sponge and soap. The water was set on high heat and it steamed everywhere, scalded and pinkened his skin raw, but he breathed in the intense warmth and let the water continue lashing against his face. Standing against the shower door with one arm pressed against the tiled wall, he clenched and unclenched his fists, blinking against the fluorescent lighting. The mirror was completely fogged and water trickled in rivulets from his naked body, pooling on the floor. He imagined it carrying away the last remnants of the hunt he’d shucked himself into as he fell from grace ten metres at a time, acquired facets and practices of a thousand personas liquefied and sloughing off the way a snake sheds its skin.

He exhaled in a long, rifling breath, swiped his forearm across his face and returned to the shower for a second round of cleansing.

Now, all packed and washed and free of bloodstains, he is ready to leave, and for good this time. He doesn’t have much, just the bare necessities for a man on the run from things crueler and more dogged than the law, so there’s little to pack to begin with. Before checking out of the hotel he moves to the bedside table and retrieves his wallet, containing fake identification in no less than six different aliases and currencies from a dozen different countries and a minuscule vial of mercuric cyanide that had gone unused when the Portuguese gunner in Barcelona had proved easier to kill by simple strangulation than tedious, drawn-out poisoning.

Standing back up, Sherlock studies himself in the wall mirror opposite. His hair, now straight and straw-coloured, is short, part of his initial disguise until when he’d started to use wigs as a convenient, albeit less foolproof, alternative. There’s some faint scarring around the corner of his right eye from when he’d gotten careless in an alleyway knife fight with another close-range assassin about a year ago, and beneath a pair of large shades and a hat he probably won’t be recognised by anyone who’s seen him as he was before. There are still traces of him, the old him on the surface, but only visible on close observation. It should do.

He turns his head away from the mirror, hoists the suitcase over his shoulder, and moves out, stowing his mobile phone deep in his pocket. It’s still far too early to switch it on again, even though his fingers are itching to push the power button and hold it down, to make the screen light up in a glaring sheet of pixels, to punch in the numbers and listen to the dial tone and breathe John’s name into the receiver.

 

 

 

The Brussels airport is full of insufferable people, Sherlock finds. So blatantly readable, so simple and pedestrian in their heedlessness. Once, before all this — before John — he’d assumed that it would get to him one day. Just one more blush of triviality, one final prattle from yet another person who bored him, the last straw on the camel. But strangely, now it doesn’t bother him as much as he knows it should. He still scoffs and smirks and hides it all beneath misleading grins, make no mistake about that, but part of him welcomes it all. Sherlock soaks up the pointless banter gladly, the background hodgepodge chatter of tourists, businessmen, workers, and finds with great surprise that he’s actually missed it.

It’s been long, too long that he’s gone about his way, looking over his shoulder at ghosts, the sensation of suspicion and paranoia clinging to his skin — anyone could be concealing a pocket zip-gun, a blade, weapons to whip out in an instant and attack — and he’s starting to live as himself again. It’s like slipping into an old pair of shoes — comfortable, but all the same it feels a couple sizes too small. Things seem different, somehow, as though he’s changed over the years. Sherlock shifts his hands over the table and stirs the coffee he’s ordered (black, two sugars) for the sake of drinking rather than the necessity to blend in and observe his quarry, and he bristles a bit when the obnoxious blonde sitting behind him goes off on a wild tangent about the nutritional benefits of toaster pastries.

He considers the possibility of turning around and telling her that the diet she broke two mornings ago isn’t going to work out, then decides he’ll save the jibe for Mycroft when he sees him again. He’s going to need something to defuse the bomb when it drops.

This reminds him that he hasn’t decided what he’ll say when he goes back to Baker Street, when he goes back to John. What would he want? An explanation? An apology? Both? He shakes his head, confused, and tries to come up with a better plan. It would be unwise to step back through that door unprepared; he’d sooner face every last assassin he’s killed all over again completely unarmed.

Sherlock thinks that maybe he’ll bring a gift. He’s seen this before, people bringing others they’ve upset something in offering, to show penitence. He’s never capitulated to convention once in his life — pointless, completely pointless and frankly, most of those practices were utter wastes of time and effort — but he recalls that John appreciates sentiment such that it probably won’t be a waste of time and effort to get him something.

Two hours of pacing up and down the aisles of the duty-free later, he sits at the entrance to the departure gate of his flight, drumming his fingers on the hard plastic of the chair next to his, on top of which sits his carry-on and a plain plastic bag of Toblerone chocolates. He wishes that he could’ve thought of a better, more meaningful offering, but the wines they stocked were dreadful, all of them, and next to bobble-heads chocolates had seemed the safer option. It should count for something that Sherlock had gotten one of everything they had — the originals, the white and black variants, the praline-filled ones, even the strongly saccharine honeycomb pyramids.

Bored and unwilling to have to sacrifice the entirety of his attention to the conversations of other passengers, he takes to his phone, trying to eke out a text to John. He begins the first dozen attempts with John’s full name and doesn’t get past the fifth word on every try, writes _I’m coming home_ and erases it as well because that’s maudlin as fuck. When he finally decides on _I’m not dead_ because brevity is generally what he works best with and ends up deleting that too, he gives up and condemns himself to enduring another hour of the brain-searing crossfire of tedious conversation.

 

 

 

He phones Molly at Heathrow. For some reason, John’s number isn’t in service anymore, and he starts to get a bit worried as the automated voice recording regurgitates the information for the fifth time. Every text he sends bounces back without fail. Sherlock doesn’t want to ring up the clinic or even 221B just yet, and when he last spoke with Molly about a month back he’d asked her about John. He would’ve asked about her as well as a courtesy, but the call had to be short. Any call that dragged out would’ve become easier to trace, made him easier to locate.

After a long while, she picks up. “Hello?” Uneasy and raw, the way she speaks, like she’s been crying a lot. Two days. No, three, judging by the quaver. Hasn’t been sleeping well either, then.

“Molly,” he says, pausing for a moment, unsure. “It’s me.” Like a code, and she should know immediately; it’s been three years of unregistered numbers and disposable phones and ciphers and calls in the night, forming a digital tongue only the two of them can speak, the language of the hunted.

Molly doesn’t say anything in reply, but he can hear her short breaths on the other end of the line. “It’s Sherlock. Holmes,” he prompts when she continues to stay quiet. “I — I’m back, permanently this time. At Heathrow, actually. It’s over, Molly. There aren’t any more left; I’ve taken care of all of them. Could you help — I can’t reach John, I tried calling him-”

“Sherlock,” she says, finally. “I’m sorry. John — he’s gone.”

Standing at the taxi stand, his breathing goes shallow and he is oblivious to the honk of cabs and roaring airplane engines. " _Gone?_ Gone...gone where?"

"He's dead, Sherlock," Molly says, and it is then that he can't hear anymore, feeling as though the city has started to cave in around him.

 

 

 

He’s already familiar with the graveyard just like how London unfolds like a map in his head, only since it’s smaller he manages to capture everything down to the smallest edge and surface. Left turns at wayward headstones and down the bramble path, navigating his way through a city of sepulchres and spires, and he has arrived.

Beneath the tall fir tree, his tombstone still stands. It looks a lot more worn now than he recalls, but it is there, black and reflective and bearing nothing but his name and a pair of dates. Next to it is John’s, which is identical in size and shape and cutting to his, a perfect copy in every conceivable facet except for the name engraved upon it. _Sherlock Holmes. John Watson._ As if there’s nothing else to tell, just the names of two dead men laid to rest in a cemetery, and it actually makes sense to Sherlock. To the world they’d both taken their own lives, after all, and only the dead who’ve died a wrongful death have stories that need to be heard by the living. He knows that well enough.

Cradling the bag of chocolates, Sherlock sets them down at the base of the headstone. It’s approaching dusk, the sky overcast in the late afternoon and barely enough sunlight filtering through the smoky clouds.

He starts to feel quite silly just standing there with his hands in his coat pockets, just doing nothing. Should he say something? John would appreciate that. Sherlock opens his mouth, closes it, tries to think of something meaningful to say, swallows, opens his mouth again, but he still can’t seem to find the words so he closes it once more and stands still with his hands clasped in front of him, just looking. John had made this seem much easier than he’d come to expect, but then again maybe it was never easy at all.

It’s not like Sherlock hasn’t attended funerals or memorials or anything like that — there was his great-grand aunt when he was six, and he’d stood at the pulpit by his mother, sulking as she delivered her eulogy. A distant cousin (twice removed? Thrice? He doesn’t remember, because it wasn’t important) at fifteen, a Saturday burial out in the country, and he still can smell spring and hot beeswax candles. His own father, but he doesn’t want to compare him to John, and besides, Mycroft had forced him to attend that time so that doesn’t count.

This feels nothing like all those times. Or rather, he hadn’t felt anything all those times, for what are funerals, ultimately, besides unavoidable distractions? You get invited, and automatically become obligated to go. Unnecessary. He never grieved, not once, and no one has ever told him how it goes. He always wondered if it was something that came to people naturally, if it was imprinted into human physiology like genes, activated only when the right conditions were met.

So this is grief — pain running invisible and toxic through his veins, boring a hole in him like rust in a car door. It feels like his heart is too full to contain within his shrinking ribcage with nowhere to bleed off the excess pressure, too tight and strangling, his cardiac muscles squeezing in a vise. It is suddenly difficult to breathe, and his knees are as weak and formless as water. The silence.

There'd been reported stories of people dying of broken hearts before — most of them patently unscientific and wrought with medical inaccuracies — but Sherlock isn't so sure now.

He extends a hand, running one elegant finger over the curved top of the tombstone and listening to the rustling of leaves overhead. May as well be his own if he closes his eyes; was it in John’s last wishes for it to be so, or someone’s idea of emblematic symmetry? Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, nothing could, possibly even forever. It’s unbearably tranquil. Some part of him he thought he’d deleted a long time ago starts to conjure up memories — how in the early days before leaving he’d watched at a distance as John laid lilies at his grave and spoke to him and waited for hours on end for absolutely nothing. From that far away Sherlock thinks, bitterly, that he'd miscalculated grossly — the fact that John cared wasn't new information, but he was strong, too. 

Sherlock had never considered the possibility that John was capable of running out of strength, that caring too much would kill him in the end.

It makes him truly wonder what he’s aiming to accomplish by this. Fact: John is dead. Fact: John will not breathe, speak or laugh again. Fact: Being here will not change the aforementioned facts regardless of how long he remains, be it an hour, a week, a lifetime. And yet, here he is, confused and so very lost and, for the first time in his life, waiting for the answers to simply drift to him, if there are any at all. He’s given up on thinking, on attempting to be rational and puzzle through this mystery because there are far too many things to work out, far too many variables to work into the equation, unsolvable, and John, _John_ …

The gamechanging constant: John is dead. Suddenly, the variables all disintegrate away into nothingness, every single one rendered unimportant in an instant. Back to basics; the Golden Rule, even though he’s never put any stock into meretricious ethical codes. John’s done it for him before, and it’s only fair that he does the same for John. He knows full well that he'll judge himself for this much later, but there's always another time for logic and rationality.

“You were…a brilliant person,” Sherlock says, playing back every single eulogy he hasn’t already deleted, and _how do people do this right?_ “I…I know I wasn’t very good at times. And. Well. You were able to change that. I was different, but you stayed. I — for the first time, I think I needed someone with me, and there was never anyone else for me but. You.” Tears; unsurprising. Not completely pointless after all. “What I said to you back then about heroes, about heroes not existing — I…retract that statement. What I mean to say is that now, I believe that I wasn’t entirely correct. That night when you saved me, came after me and shot a man dead to save my life — no one’s done anything like that before, and I don’t foresee that anyone else will.” He sinks to a knee, sliding his finger down the inscription as tears sting his nose, and Sherlock thinks of all those times he’d been too far away to make out whatever John told him, how he hadn’t, _couldn’t_ have listened. A hundred one-sided conversations, wasted. A slash of what has to be regret because it is starkly different from grief and yet remains the one and the same, strange and unfamiliar in his bones. Still his fault to bear for the rest of his life, entirely, and he lowers his head reverently for the only man who has ever showed him twice what it is to cry. “I’m sorry. You’re dead and it’s my fault. You deserved better than this, John.”

He brings an arm up to rub at his eyes, levelling his gaze, and in the dark mirror of John’s tombstone there is a long smear of darkness, a partial silhouette of someone behind him, watching. Instantly, he whips around, hands fisting for surely what must be someone he’d neglected to sniff out and neutralise and every cell in his body is screaming _stupid stupid stupid…_

The bottom of Sherlock’s heart feels like it flat out collapses under the crushing mass of the organ, like a hole’s been augered into it, as he turns and sees that it’s John.

Everything whites out a little bit, like peering into in a thick mist, and Sherlock’s mind has jolted into a terrifying haze of thoughts and things and observations. The silence they stretch out into the expanse of a full minute is nothing short of excruciating, and when he manages to somehow wing past the initial shock at seeing John again Sherlock takes the opportunity presented by every second to know fully if he’s real. John’s wearing his quotidian black coat and jeans faded by years of consistent laundering, and the tan collar of his jumper peeks out around his neck. He looks haggard and much older, the lines bracketing his mouth and eyes now deeper and more pronounced, as if someone has stencilled them in thickly with a pencil. His hair is still short, like how Sherlock remembers, but any indication of combing or neatness has long been stripped away by the weather. Most of his weight is centred on his left leg; he’s been limping again, but not recently — no cane. Shadows under John’s feet and eyes, the wind rumpling his clothes, the telltale signs of insomnia and exhaustion evident in his face, and this is real at a glance, and already the surprise welling up in Sherlock’s chest is threatening to arrest his breathing.

John makes no indication of movement toward Sherlock, and likewise, Sherlock holds his ground, hands unballing and slackening and he’s playing everything by ear now because for all his rehearsing he has absolutely no idea what to expect, his heart suddenly cantering frantically and everything he sees is John’s arms John’s tired eyes John’s perfectly straight mouth John standing so unnaturally still before him and why aren’t they doing anything? He picks himself up from the ground, holding John’s gaze, and takes a tentative step forward.

Immediately, John limps backward, almost stumbling, with no net change in the space between them. “Don’t come any closer,” he says quietly. His voice is rough and shredded, and Sherlock knows at once that he’s sick. “That’s as far as you’ll go.”

Sherlock blinks, hard, his eyes still wet and wind-stung. Think, breathe, stop, think some more about this, how to make a proper approach. John's alive. _Alive_. “John,” Sherlock starts, uncertain, and tries to focus on the facts, like he always used to. “You’re alive.”

John’s lip twitches. “Yeah. You too. Funny how that works.”

“How…?”

“Mycroft,” John murmurs with a sigh. “He was the one who told me. About you…not being dead. At first I didn’t believe him; I thought he was mad, that he’d gone completely mad, or he was chasing ghosts like I…” He pauses, turns away slightly and gulps a few times, the flicker of a moment’s weakness in his eyes. He sets his face once again and lifts his stare to Sherlock. “Anyway,” he says, and then nothing else.

Sherlock rustles the bag of Toblerones in his hand, picking up courage. “I — I brought you chocolates,” he says lamely, and regrets the inanity of his statement immediately because _chocolates, really, chocolates_ are the best he has when they’ve all but three years of loneliness and lost summers? Foolish, foolish, foolish, easily the most idiotic thing he could have conceived, when he’s postulated better acts of seeking forgiveness, like simply apologising or asking John to punch him or reaching out for him and kissing life back into him…

John doesn’t smile, doesn’t even offer any evidence that he heard Sherlock at all. “You look different," he says, sounding torn.

Sherlock nods slowly. "I was...no longer in need of concealment, and I wanted you to be able to recognise me." He's already explaining himself, but for all the wrong reasons. Not the explanations John needs to hear. Is the world still running? He's not sure. Time has become irrelevant to him, an insignificant smudge at the periphery.

He wants John to speak some more, to hear more collections of words to confirm that he's alive. But awash in fading confusion and overwhelming relief, he is still faintly aware that he's not in a position to make demands; even from his viewpoint, that would be John's prerogative.

"It's true, then," John murmurs shakily, like he cannot believe it. "He was right. You're alive. Tell me you're alive."

"I'm alive," Sherlock repeats obediently. If John wants it, he will give it to him, no questions asked. God, whatever he wants, Sherlock will find it and give it to him to make it right again.

John flinches at his words, like he's been burned. "You sick bastard,” he says. “I thought…you — no, shut up, just listen to me — you made me think that you were dead, and that wasn’t enough for you? You had to make me watch you die too? And then everything that came afterwards; I don’t even know what the hell you thought about half the time then, but that — what you did was…fuck. Fucking hell, Sherlock.” His right leg trembles even as he digs his fingers into the denim clothing his thigh, holding on tight, and Sherlock wants so badly to close the melee between them and make him stop.

But he can’t do that, John doesn’t want that now, wouldn’t let him so much as get within five metres of him. That much, Sherlock is able to understand.

“I mourned you, Sherlock,” John continues, his voice cracking. “I watched you fall and held your bloody hand and _buried_ you, right here. You were dead, and I had to see it all. Do you…do you have any idea what you made me go through? Do you understand any of it now? You were alive, all that time. Did you even think about me, resigning myself to a lifetime without you, to never seeing you again? I — I wanted you to know what it was like.” He looks down at his shoes, as if he can no longer stand to look at Sherlock, and grinds his good heel into the grass. “Don’t just stand there, Sherlock. Say something, you _wanker_.”

And Sherlock does want to say something, wants to say everything that he’s ever wanted to say to John in three years gone by, but he’s scared of it all being incorrect somehow, as if he gets it wrong the second time round it will kill John again, and for good. Should he continue to explain now? There are forty-three different versions of explaining why he did what he had to do, each one rehearsed multiple times over and committed to memory, and now all of them are floating away from him even as he tries to shape his mouth around them. Improvisation has never been his strong suit.

What could he do to make this better? He could give it a try, show John the evidence of his tears. He'd pike himself in the chest as a display of empathy, but that wouldn't solve a damn thing now, would it? “John,” he whispers, because it’s the safest thing to do. “John, please…”

He doesn’t even realise he’s been walking closer to John until his legs have stopped moving. As soon as he lets go of the bag and John permits, Sherlock reaches up with both hands to cup John’s face. His cheeks are warm with fever and at this distance his nose is huge as ever and Sherlock can smell his dry breath, sour and stale with sickness but relieving all the same, because John is breathing, is alive in his hands. Leaning forward, Sherlock kisses him with delicate precision, once, twice, until John dips his head downward and leans his head on Sherlock’s breast, his hands unmoving and useless beside him.

“God, Sherlock, tell me what I did to deserve what you did,” John chokes out, his words heavy and cutting, but he doesn’t push Sherlock away. “What did I do to you to deserve this?”

John’s voice is a vulnerable plea, a whimper for help in the night, and Sherlock cannot get him in his arms fast enough. Close to him, John is wrecked and unwell and shaking, a terrible kind of gorgeous that Sherlock wants so badly to save, to preserve and take apart and build up again. He takes his wrist, feels the quiver of John's aching muscles, and longs hard to mark him all over with his fingerprints like a promise to never leave him again. _You're here, you're here,_ he thinks, but he doesn't verbalise it. Not a hallucination, after all — such misery, John’s and his own, both dizzying and more nauseating than ionising radiation, could never be unreal. The world could all but go to hell with Moriarty and himself; he would never have John hurt again, for them both.

 

 

 

After a few rounds of hugging and touching and kissing they find themselves snugged up with each other, leaning against the tree sheltering both their tombstones as Sherlock drops kisses along John's heated cheek and John strokes his scar. Already evening and with the skylight cleared of clouds, the polluted London sunset is a silty shade of alizarin red. Peeking over John’s lowered head, Sherlock can glimpse their names at a sideways angle, and if he manipulates his line of sight just right, it almost seems as though _Sherlock_ and _John_ are a singularity in gold letters, completely indistinct from each other.

“Well,” John murmurs into his shoulder. Sherlock doesn’t say anything in reply because it isn’t a question. Neither is it a proclamation of any sort that warrants an immediate response, but all the same Sherlock nods, as acknowledgement.

“Are we…fine, now?” Sherlock asks.

John tucks his chin inward and sucks a breath in through his teeth. “No,” he admits after a long pause. “Yes. Maybe we — Christ, I don't even know what I'm saying. I have no idea. Depends on what you mean by fine. Were we even fine before?”

He doesn’t quite understand, but searches himself for an answer anyway. “If we weren’t,” Sherlock says slowly, remembering all he can of years of passively watching bad telly, “we’ll make it fine this time round.”

“Sound like something you stole from an episode of _Eastenders_. And just so you know, you’re still a massive wanker.”

It was _Coronation Street_ , but John doesn’t need to know that now. It’s enough, because John makes a low humming noise that sounds like approval after speaking, and settles deeper still into Sherlock.

“Three years,” Sherlock muses softly. “You felt…like that. For three years.” The thought is a twisting clutch of guilt in his belly, one that prompts him to wrap his arms tighter around John, to keep him closer, as if by doing so he could insert himself back into every one of those days, if only to stave off John’s loneliness like a talisman warding away evil spirits.

John shifts a little in his caress, closing his eyes tiredly; his migraine must be worse than Sherlock had initially thought. “Two years, ten months and three weeks, actually. Mycroft informed me a little over a month ago.”

He ponders John’s words, and how he's counted up the days. “Did…did you feel like that every day?” Holding his breath, Sherlock is unsure if he really does want to hear the answer to that question, because an affirmative answer will make it even less likely for him to be able to live with himself again.

At this, John’s eyes open. He clears his throat to little effect. “No. No, not every day. It…gets better and worse, I suppose. I don’t know; it’s hard to explain. I’m sorry, but could we stop? I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Then don’t.” Sherlock considers, postulates how it must be to live that long without a heart, and wonders if any normal human could ever adapt. But John isn’t normal, and neither is he, so for once Sherlock honestly doesn’t know, and he’s fine with that because in spite of all that they’ve managed to reach this point. Whether or not it will continue to be fine with here on out is something else he’s willing to stake a chance on.

They lapse back into silence. A thought buzzes in the corner of Sherlock’s consciousness, and he decides that it’s worth throwing out there. “I haven’t told you that I’m sorry yet,” he states, running his fingers through John’s soft hair.

“Are you?”

It’s an odd question, but Sherlock answers immediately. “Yes,” he says, with all sincerity. He’s never meant anything so much before. “I didn’t think — I wasn't aware that what I did would be equivalent to…that. I couldn’t have known, but I couldn’t have told you.”

“Did anyone know?” John asks.

“Molly,” Sherlock says, unwilling to hide anything else from John, fully thankful for their reestablished nexus. “She helped me back then, but she was the only one, I promise. It was…absolutely necessary.”

“You didn’t need to add the last part, you know.” John puts his arm over Sherlock’s, fingers playful on the dense fabric of his coat. He appears to hold back a small grin, and Sherlock thinks he feels his own heart yawn open just a little bit more. “Well, shit. She thinks I’m dead. Everyone thinks we’re dead. There’s going to be a hell lot of explaining to do when we go back.”

“Do you want to go back?” Sherlock asks, trying the best he can to gather up John in his arms as a sudden windchill sweeps over the graveyard. Pressed against him, John shivers and zips up his coat; Sherlock promptly unbuttons his own long coat and pulls John in, trapping heat. It’s fortunate that John isn’t a very large person, because Sherlock manages to bundle him up like a babe and put his arms around him, giving his own body heat as penance. Through the wool of John’s jumper he can feel the warmth of elevated body temperature in mild illness, the muffled thrum of his heartbeat a tympanic rhythm that reminds Sherlock constantly that John isn’t dead and is with him once again. It’s a gesture that is as much for John as much as it is for his own reassurance.

“I don’t know,” John admits. “As far as the British government and the city of Westminster are concerned, we’re both dead. We don’t have to go back. We could go somewhere else, start afresh. Do what we’ve always done, or try out something new.”

“You couldn’t bear to be anywhere else but London,” Sherlock points out.

John shakes his head lightly and winces at the effort. “I’ll manage, if you do. If this whole stunt has proved anything, it’s that I’ll follow you wherever. I don’t care where.”

Sherlock absorbs this, settling his mouth at John’s fringe and breathing a kiss into his temple. “We don’t have to decide now,” he says, because he wants to remain like this for a while, for as long as it is pragmatically possible, just him and John hidden away. They’ll share the rest of the day right here — John deserves that much.

“Mm. What do you want to do now, then?”

He pats down John’s pale forehead, the fever hot on his skin. “Go to a doctor. Make you better.”

“I am a doctor,” John murmurs softly into Sherlock’s ribs. “And we can’t just go walking into the A&E — we’re dead, remember? We’d be medical miracles.”

“It’d give them something to talk about,” Sherlock suggests, and is delighted when John gives a small giggle.

“People do little else,” John says in sleepy reply, and kisses Sherlock on the chest, right over his heart, belonging once more.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this](http://doomslock.tumblr.com/post/31935251459) AU gifset on Tumblr:
> 
> "AU - The Lie
> 
> John finds out that Sherlock faked his death before he returns. He decides to give the detective a taste of his own medicine."


End file.
